Larry Norman will soon be reaching his 40th year in
music. He has been called "the father of Christian rock"
because it was he who first combined rock and roll with Christian
lyrics back in 1956. He received the C.A.S. Lifetime Achievement
Award several years ago. Previous to that recognition, Contemporary
Christian Music Magazine compiled a vote from a national poll
of different critics and writers who named Norman's Only
Visiting This Planet record the most significant and influential
gospel album ever released in the field of comtemporary Christian music.

He started writing songs when he was a child and performing them
in public at the age of nine. With the emergence of Elvis Presley,
pastors raged from the pulpit that rock music was from the Devil
and could never be used by God. Larry felt differently - that rock
music had evolved from the black gospel music of American
slaves; that God didn't need to use rock or any other kind of music. God
had used the cross.

Larry continued to confront the evangelical community with his
own personal vision of what best communicated Christ's love to the
Sixties generation. He signed with Capitol Records in 1966.
Making three records, he left after releasing his landmark album Upon This Rock.
He next signed with MGM and released Only
Visiting This Planet and So Long Ago The
Garden. His style of music had been contreversial for almost
fifteen years before the Jesus Movement sprang up. Even his
own father did not like his son's music, but when others began to write
songs which were similar to his - things finally began to change. Time
Magazine recognised him as the most significant artist in his
field and Billboard Magazine called him the most
important writer since Paul Simon. Coincidently he was written
up by Christianity Today at the same time and this
finally silenced his father's protestations. Although on stage he often
appeared to be daring an audience to like him, this enfant
terrible - the "bad boy of Christian music" -
began to be perceived differently.

Upon This Rock
was banned by the majority of Bible Bookstores for two years. Only
Visiting This Planet remained in limbo fo over six years. Finally,
in 1975, after the explosive success of In Another Land
within the Christian community, Larry created The Compleat
Trilogy, a three-record boxed set of Planet, Garden
and Land which included a book explaining the work he
had been doing. He was told by the "mother company" that the
gospel community wasn't ready for his previous two albums and that,
frankly, none of the in-house staff or executives
"understood" Planet or Garden
anyway.

Upon leaving MGM Records in 1974 he had started his own label, Solid
Rock Records. His first recording, Orphans From Eden,
was never released. His next album, In Another Land, was
executorially censored by the "mother company" which insisted
on removing any music they felt was "too negative" or
"too controversial." When his 1976 album Something New Under The Son,
net with similar censorship, he took off on a seven-month world tour
and wrote Voyage Of The Vigilant. The idea was to combine live
concert performances with on-the-road hotel room recordings
and stop-over studio sessions whenever foreign studios were
available. This expansive tour was covered by journalist Steve Turner
and chronicled by photographer D.C. Riggot. Larry toured with a
rock and roll band and also performed solo sets throughout America,
Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Great Britain,
Germany, France, Italy, and more exotic locales like Israel, Lebanon,
India, Hong Kong, and Japan - but with songs like "Three
Million Gods," and "Cats Of The Coliseum,"
discussing the Hindu religion and the early martyrdom of
Christians in Rome, this album was not acceptable because it was
considered too "avant garde." So Voyage Of The Vigilant
was never released. Larry's joyous trashcan symphony Le Garage
Du Monde, The Young Lions' Spirit And Flesh ensemble
work and Steve Scott's Moving Pictures were all
considered too far over-the-edge for the American youth gospel market
and never released.

So for what proved to be only a very short time, Larry produced
other artists he had discovered in obscurity. Each of their album
releases had been successful, both artistically and commercially. This
"golden age of Solid Rock" was still in full flower, and
Larry was getting ready to sign with Warner Brothers when he was
involved in the airplane accident of 1978 which injured his
spine, neck, and skull - and caused him partial brain damage. This
started him down a very different road. His farewell song from Voyage
Of The Vigilant proved to be self prophetic in a way other than
he had intended and his brain damage silenced his literate voice for
the next twelve years. His plan had been to let his contract run
out uppon his return to America, but now he was unable to carry out his
plans to move to Warner's.